Biography

German botanist and orchid taxonomist who made a number of expeditions to Africa and the Malay Archipelago. Schlechter made two trips to New Guinea, ostensibly in search of the gutta-percha and other latex-yielding plants, but his consuming interest here and elsewhere was the orchid flora and the Asclepidaceae family.

Born in Berlin, Schlechter trained in horticulture at the Berlin University Garden before leaving Europe on his first botanical expedition when he 19 years old. He reached Cape Town in 1891, where he worked as a gardener and inspector of grape vines for the phylloxera disease. He was soon employed as an assistant in the private herbarium of Dr Harry Bolus (later acquired by Cape Town University). From 1891-1892 Schlechter collected plants in the vicinity of his workplace, but after leaving Bolus in October 1892 began to explore further afield in the southern and eastern Cape, Transkei, Natal and Transvaal, returning to Cape Town after three years. During this period he published his first paper on the plant family to which he would devote the rest of his life, the orchids. He also produced his first paper on the Asclepidaceae.

Schlechter returned to Europe in 1895 with copious collections of both asclepiads and orchids, which he worked up at the Botany Department of the British Museum in London, where he formed a working relationship with A.B. Rendle. The pair later produced joint research on the Asclepidaceae of tropical Africa. Schlechter returned to London whenever he was back in Europe, visiting both the British Museum and the Royal Botanic Gardens, Kew. He was not particularly popular, however, because of his reputedly dogmatic and insensitive character.

In 1896 Schlechter continued his explorations in southern Africa, travelling in the west and north-west Cape, then in Mozambique from late 1897 to early 1898. From April 1898 he was to be found at the university in Berlin, a somewhat drained figure weakened by dysentery and tropical fevers. This was nevertheless an important period for the botanist, for he mixed with renowned colleagues such as A. Engler, L. Diels and Otto Warburg.

The latter, an economic botanist, was probably the driving force that saw Schlechter hired by the German Colonial Department to lead an expedition in West Africa in search of latex-producing plants (the Westafrikanische Kautschuk-Expedition, 1899-1900). Over the next two decades Schlechter was involved in expeditions nearly continuously, visiting Sumatra, Java, Celebes (Sulawesi), Borneo, New Guinea and Australia. In 1901-1902 he was again in the service of the Colonial Department, this time exploring Malaysia, Indonesia, German New Guinea and the South Sea islands. He proceeded to Sydney and then New Caledonia in 1902, sailing back to Germany via Australia and Sri Lanka in 1903. He thereafter completed his doctoral thesis dealing with the phytogeography of New Caledonia and made another brief trip to West Africa to assess progress with Silkrubber (Funtumia elastica Stapf) cultivation.

In 1906 he was back in the Malay archipelago, embarking on his longest and final collecting expedition, which lasted until 1909. Destinations included Hong Kong, the Philippines, Sumatra, Borneo and Papua New Guinea, with the latter country serving as his base. He had in fact been commissioned (by the Colonial Office) to establish a rubber research station at Bulu, but it is his botanical collections during this time for which he is best remembered. He reached Germany once more in 1910, where he began on his major oeuvre, Die Orchidaceen von Deutsch-Neu-Guinea. Published between 1911 and 1914, its volumes numbered over 1,000 pages. A few years later his work on South American orchids, Die Orchideenfloren der südamerikanischen Kordilleranstaaten, made its appearance, and in 1915 the first edition of his Die Orchideen. He worked with the America botanist Oakes Ames on a monographic treatment of orchids of the world, and met Ames in person in 1922. He did not neglect Asclepidaceae taxonomy but published several more important papers dealing with their taxonomy in the last decade of his life.

He married Alexandra Sobennikoff shortly after his return, with whom he had a family of two daughters. Schlechter spent the remainder of his career at the Berlin Botanical Museum, where he became a curator in 1921. The First World War brought the downfall of the rubber industry he had helped to build up in New Guinea, but he did not live to see the destruction of another of his great achievements, when his collections were destroyed along with the Berlin herbarium in 1943. He died at the relatively young age of 53, in 1925, apparently from the lingering effects of tropical diseases he had contracted. He had produced a vast amount of work during his 30 years as a practising botanist. Early in his career he had set himself the task of describing a new species every day, and indeed proposed in excess of 1,000 new orchids alone. He published more than 300 papers in total, not only on orchids and asclepiads but on the taxonomy of plants from other families including Magnoliaceae and Gesneriaceae. A few holotypes of Asclepiads collected by him were on loan from Berlin to the British Museum in the 1940s and thus escaped intact and duplicates of his other specimens are widely distributed. His name lives on in the genera Schlechteranthus Schwantes, Schlechteria Bolus ex Schltr. (Brassicaceae), Schlechterella K.Schum (Asclepidaceae), Schlechterina Harms (Passifloraceae) and Rudolfiella Hoehne (Orchidaceae), and numerous species.

Sources:
O. Ames, 1944, "Destruction of the Schlechter Herbarium by Bombing", American Orchid Society Bulletin, 13(4)
O. Ames, 1933, "Friedrich Richard Rudolf Schlechter 1872-1925", American Orchid Society Bulletin, 2(2)
A. Nicholas, 1992, "The Asclepiadaceous works of Rudolf F. Schlechter (1872-1925)", Willdenowia, 22: 215-264
A.B. Rendle, 1926, Journal of Botany, 64: 24-25.